Custom Short Links: Why the Back-Half Matters

Most short links end in seven random characters. They work perfectly and they cost you clicks, because the part after the slash is the only part of a shortened URL that carries any meaning.

Compare these two, imagining each in a text message from someone you half-remember:

example.co/a7Kd92x — could be anything. Could be malware.

example.co/price-list — obviously a price list.

Same destination, same domain, same length, completely different click-through. The second one answers the question the reader is actually asking, which is what happens if I tap this.

Two halves, two jobs

A short link has a domain and a back-half, and they do different work.

The domain answers who is this from. When it's your own domain, that answer is your brand, which is why a branded short link is trusted more than a generic one. It also isolates you from the reputation of everyone else using a shared shortener.

The back-half answers what is this. That is the one you control per link, for free, in about four seconds — and it is the one most people skip.

A convention that scales

Naming links ad hoc works until you have forty of them and can't remember what /promo2 was. A convention worth adopting:

audience-thing-when — for example newsletter-webinar-march or ig-catalogue-q3.

Some rules that save pain later:

• Lowercase always. Some systems treat back-halves as case-sensitive; humans retyping from a poster do not.
• Hyphens, not underscores. Underscores disappear under link underlining.
• No ambiguous characters. Avoid a naked 0/O or 1/l/I where anyone might type the link by hand. This matters enormously in print.
• Don't encode secrets. A back-half is public and guessable. /payroll-2026 invites exactly the traffic you don't want.
• Keep it short enough to say out loud. If it goes on a podcast, someone has to speak it.

When random is the right answer

Readable is not always correct. Use a generated back-half when:

• The link is one of hundreds generated programmatically
• Guessability is a problem — sequential or predictable names let people enumerate your links
• The link is genuinely private, where a random string is a weak but real barrier

The rule of thumb: readable when a human will see it, random when only a machine will.

Print changes the rules

A link on a poster, a package, or a business card gets typed by hand, which changes everything. Keep it short enough to type without resentment, avoid characters that get misread, and never rely on case. Pair it with a QR code so most people never type it at all — and use a dynamic code so you can change the destination after printing.

Redirects are not free of consequences

Two things worth knowing before you wrap everything:

SEO. A short link is a redirect, and redirects pass through rather than accumulate. Use them for sharing, tracking, and print — not as a substitute for real internal linking on your own site.

Permanence. Anything printed is permanent. Anything shared is effectively permanent too, because you cannot recall a message. Never delete a short link that has been distributed; if the destination dies, repoint it at something useful rather than leaving a dead end.

Reuse is a trap

Reusing an old short link for a new campaign inherits all its history — the clicks, the audience, the analytics. Your new campaign starts pre-polluted and you can never cleanly separate the two. New campaign, new link, every time. They cost nothing.

Pick a convention, write it down somewhere your future self will find it, and use it consistently. Create a link with a custom back-half and see the difference in the click-through.